#NASA astronauts returned to the International Space Station (ISS) after their preventive evacuation to the docked Dragon spacecraft over an air leak on the #ISS Russian segment, Roscosmos Deputy Head for Piloted Programs Sergey Krikalyov said.

"According to our information, the NASA astronauts have returned to the ISS to continue work in normal mode. Nothing endangers the crew’s safety. Earlier, the NASA crew was transferred to the docked Crew Dragon spacecraft for the time of repairs in a transfer chamber," the Roscosmos official said.

NASA Spokesperson Bethany Stevens said earlier on June 5 that NASA had ordered astronauts aboard the International Space Station to transfer to their docked Dragon spacecraft as a measure of precaution as the Russian crew was carrying out repairs on the Zvezda module after detecting new air leaks,

#Roscosmos announced on June 5 that cosmonauts had found two potential air leaks in the Zvezda module. The first leak was quickly sealed and work was underway to seal the other, it said.

#SpaceX denied fast index entry by S&P 500. S&P Global said on Thursday it was not changing the requirements for entry into its major indices, dealing a setback to Elon Musk’s SpaceX by effectively ruling out a swift entry for the world’s biggest-ever IPO into the benchmark S&P 500 index.

Musk has rewritten the IPO playbook for ⁠SpaceX in many ways from planning to give retail investors a bigger role in allocations to pushing for early index inclusion, and structuring governance to preserve strong founder ​control.

The company is raising US$75 billion and targeting a $1.75-trillion valuation that would place it among the top 10 most valuable U.S.-listed firms, even as only a fraction of its shares are available for trading.

But S&P said “exceptions to the financial viability, seasoning, and IWF (investable weight factor) requirements should not be granted solely based on market capitalization.”

To be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in its most recent quarter as well as for the sum of its most recent four quarters, according to one of the rules S&P left unchanged.

SpaceX posted a net loss of $4.94 billion in 2025, even as revenue rose 33 per cent to $18.67 billion.

Investor consultations

S&P had consulted with investors about shortening the time a megacap company must be publicly listed before joining its indexes, waiving minimum float requirements and removing its profitability requirement.

The S&P 500 is Wall Street’s most widely followed benchmark. Passive S&P 500 index funds with trillions of dollars in assets would have been forced to buy up SpaceX shares had rules been changed to admit it to the index.

“It speaks highly of the credibility of S&P Dow Jones Indices to be rules-based and make sure there’s profitability before entrance to the index,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth.

“Making exceptions because companies are so large and have been private so long yet are still not profitable, didn’t make a great deal of sense.”

Nasdaq has already made changes that will make it easier for SpaceX, Anthropic and other newly listed megacaps to join its Nasdaq 100 index.

Nasdaq 100 index funds will be forced to buy a sizeable portion of publicly available SpaceX shares when the company joins that index.

Exchange operators have ramped up efforts to boost initial public listings as richly valued technology firms such as SpaceX and AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI edge closer to public offerings, amid growing concerns over a steady decline in the number of U.S.-listed companies.

S&P Global said it would modify entry rules for its broader S&P Total Market Index and Dow Jones U.S. Total Stock Market Index, creating a pathway for SpaceX to join those less widely followed indexes.

SpaceX has also already become eligible for inclusion in both the Russell U.S. Equity Indexes and the FTSE Global Equity Index Series under the newly announced fast-entry rules from the index provider FTSE Russell.

Noel Randewich, Pritam Biswas and Shivansh Tiwary, Reuters

#NASA declares its Mars Maven spacecraft dead after six months of silence. The space agency confirmed Wednesday that the mission had ended after more than a decade of observations.

Launched in 2013 to study the red planet’s atmosphere from orbit, Maven mysteriously fell silent in early December after passing behind Mars. Data indicated the spacecraft went into a fast spin, which disrupted its orbit and drained the onboard batteries.

A review board convened by NASA earlier this year concluded that the spacecraft is useless and unable to be recovered. An investigation continues into what caused the problem.

Besides studying Martian weather and observing a stray interstellar comet last year, Maven helped relay information from NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on the surface.

Maven’s lead scientist, Shannon Curry of the University of Colorado Boulder, said the spacecraft made a number of “amazing discoveries.”

Maven “has truly advanced our understanding of the Martian atmosphere and evolution,” she said in a statement.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

#China's #Shenzhou-21 astronaut crew returns to Earth

Blue Origin’s New Glenn #rocket exploded in a massive fireball while undergoing a test on a Florida launchpad Thursday evening, according to video footage taken of the event.

#NASA lays out moon base plans with landers, buggies and drones at the top of the list. The space agency outlined the first phase of its moon base plans on Tuesday, awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to four U.S. companies.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will provide a pair of landers to deliver moon buggies to the lunar surface, at a spot near the moon’s south pole. These so-called lunar terrain vehicles will be built by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost. Firefly Aerospace, which landed successfully on the moon last year, will deliver the first drones to the moon.

All this hardware is ideally supposed to arrive before the first Artemis astronauts land on the moon, planned for as early as 2028.

During April’s Artemis II mission, four astronauts flew around the moon, traveling deeper into space than the Apollo moon crews did during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For next year’s Artemis III, another team of astronauts will practice docking NASA’s Orion capsule in orbit around Earth with the lunar landers being developed for crews by Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

NASA is targeting Artemis III for mid-2027, with a landing by two astronauts following as soon as 2028. The moon base’s second phase, from 2029 into the early 2030s, will start building up the permanent infrastructure, including a power grid. As for when the base will be ready to support astronauts for extended periods in specialized permanent habitats, that’s expected sometime in the 2030s, during the third phase.

“Then we’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, we’re permanently here and we’re not giving it up,’” said NASA’s moon base program executive Carlos Garcia-Galan.

Garcia-Galan envisions a moon base sprawling over hundreds of square miles, with a perimeter marked by drones, dubbed MoonFall, stationed at the corners.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said these territory markers are meant to be respectful of other countries’ spacecraft and equipment that might be nearby. He expects reciprocity in the matter.

The goal of the moon base is to encourage a lunar economy while conducting scientific research and laying the foundation for a Mars expedition, Isaacman stressed.

“For those waiting patiently, the grand return is close at hand and we will not slow down,” Isaacman said. “We are really just getting started.”

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

The #internet was ‘too expensive’ too . Every new infrastructure platform can look uneconomic at first. Early systems are often bespoke, supply chains immature and scaling doesn’t yet exist. The result: cost structures can appear daunting, if not irrational, when judged by the standards of those more traditional models.

#WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force plans to add 2,800 active-duty personnel and 2,000 civilian employees in fiscal year 2027 as it looks to nearly double the size of the service by the end of the decade, the service’s top officer told lawmakers this week.

Gen. Chance #Saltzman, chief of space operations, said the personnel increase is intended to put the service on a path from roughly 10,000 active-duty Guardians today to about 20,000 by 2030.

The expansion comes as the #Pentagon sharply increases spending on military space programs, including missile defense satellites, launch systems, cyber protection and communications networks.

During Department of the Air Force posture hearings this week before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, lawmakers broadly backed the Space Force’s proposed fiscal 2027 budget of about $71 billion, more than double the enacted 2026 level. Some legislators questioned whether the personnel buildup could move even faster.

Saltzman said the service’s growth rate is constrained by training capacity and the pace at which new operational units can be established.

“We can’t bring them all on at once, because our training pipeline has to be able to support that, and quite frankly, the squadrons that we need to stand up aren’t ready yet,” Saltzman told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“So it’s about synchronizing it all over the next four or five years,” he said.

Despite taking on responsibilities including missile warning, satellite operations, launch oversight and space domain awareness — the monitoring of objects and threats in orbit — the service has remained comparatively small.

Saltzman said growing mission demands are now forcing the service to expand more rapidly.

“The new missions that have been given to the Space Force are going to require something on the order of about 40 new squadrons,” he said. “That represents an increase of about 2800 guardians and another 2,000 civilians, just to do the work of the new missions being added to address threats and continue to provide the support to the joint force.”

Many of the new positions are expected to focus on technical specialties including cyber operations, engineering, intelligence, acquisitions and satellite operations.

Saltzman also tied the increase to the Space Force’s growing emphasis on “space control,” a term used to describe protecting U.S. satellites and countering adversary systems if necessary. The Pentagon’s 2027 budget proposal includes large increases for missile-tracking satellite networks, military communications systems and launch infrastructure.

He said procurement growth alone would require the creation of 10 additional program offices to oversee acquisitions and deliver new systems into operation.

The civilian hiring push comes after the service lost nearly 14% of its civilian workforce in 2025 during Pentagon-wide personnel reductions tied to the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, initiative. Space Force officials said roughly 780 civilian employees departed, affecting areas including acquisitions and contracting where the military relies heavily on technical civilian expertise.

To compete for specialized talent, the Space Force is also considering broader use of “direct commissioning” authorities, which would allow experienced cyber and technical professionals to enter military service at higher officer ranks rather than beginning at entry-level positions — similarly to how physicians enter the military medical corps as captains, majors or lieutenant colonels.

“Cyber is critical,” he said. “In fact, it’s indistinguishable from space operations. If you can’t control the networks that distribute the data, you can’t do the space missions.”

The service is expanding internal training pipelines while also recruiting from the private sector, Saltzman said.

“So if you join the Space Force, and you have cyber credibility … we might bring you in as a captain or a major.”

#SpaceX delayed a critical test of its massive Starship rocket on Thursday after troubleshooting various problems just before liftoff. Ground equipment problem scrubs #Starship launch attempt

#SpaceX reveals plans for what could be the biggest-ever initial public offering. NEW YORK — Elon Musk announced plans Wednesday for one of the biggest stock sales ever by taking public a space company that is currently losing billions of dollars year.

A filing shows that his SpaceX lost US$2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue, and the losses kept piling up at the start of this year, too.

The prospectus did not put a dollar figure on the amount Musk hopes to raise, but various reports have put it at $75 billion or so. An offering of that size would easily surpass the current title holder, Saudi Aramco, the oil giant that went public seven years ago and raised $26 billion.

SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., has said the money will help finance projects to put people on the moon and Mars in its quest to make humans an intergalactic species as they face existential threats that could wipe out civilization.

“We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs,” the filing states.

The prospectus reads in part like a Hollywood fantasy version of the future, detailing in one section how part of Musk’s compensation will be granted only if he maintains “a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.”

Short of that, the stock sale alone could make Musk, a major owner who founded SpaceX in 2002, the world’s first trillionaire. Forbes currently puts his net worth at $839 billion.

In addition to making reusable rockets to hurl astronauts into orbit, SpaceX has other businesses, some successful, some struggling — and with plenty of questions marks.

The document shows that Starlink, the world’s largest satellite communications company, is a big source of cash for the company, generating $4.4 billion in operating income last year. The business uses 10,000 satellites in low orbit to provide internet service to 10 million people in 150 countries and territories.

Among the struggling businesses are two Musk units that were recently acquired by SpaceX — his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, and his artificial intelligence business, xAI. Those purchases were blasted by some SpaceX investors as bailouts because they are big money losers.